Dear Colleagues:
 
Even though it's summer, there's a lot going on at McCormack Graduate School:
 
· Over the last few months our Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) has won a $1M endowment from the Osher Foundation, and that endowment earned a 50% match from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  So congratulations to Wichian Rojanawon for this wonderful $1.5M accomplishment!
 
· We've recently been joined by Anne Kelly Contini, previously the Senior Vice President of the Massachusetts American Cancer Society and Consultant to the Health Care Reform Coalition, to investigate an exciting new project. Anne will test our belief that the recent Universal Health Care legislation in Massachusetts does not have a sufficiently comprehensive evaluation component, and whether we could design and implement that evaluation component as part of a new health policy initiative at MGS.  She will be reporting on her conclusions within the next couple of months. 

· The Commonwealth Compact  has begun work with well over 100 Compact Signers, dramatically expanded the outreach for new signers, and begun to build the diversity clearinghouse and minority talent database.  In order to permit Bob Turner and Colleen Richards Powell to focus on that work, we've asked Libbie Shufro, until recently the President and CEO of the Boston Center for the Arts, to join us as a part time development person. During the next few months, she will also be getting to know the Centers and Institutes at MGS, and we will all think together about whether MGS could afford to invest long-term in a development person to help with all of our work.
 
· The recent Women, Work & Wages Conference of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy was a tremendous success, attracting guests from across the country.  I know that women in Montana, for example, are already contemplating replicating a conference in their state.
 
And that's not all.  Watch the news media in the first week of July, since Padraig O'Malley is trying to again convene key Iraqi leaders-this time in Iraq- to hasten the process of peace and reconciliation in that fractured country.
 
Have a wonderful July.